Unified Messaging and Unified Communications

Joseph Parlas

Introduction

Welcome to the world of Unified Communications. But what does that really entail? For most, it is a process in which all information is shared in real-time mode. No longer is it valid to wait one day or even 15 minutes for an answer to your question; it now is done in a real time using many tools in the IP Telecommunications tool chest. That's right, telecommunications is now just another application, or I should say, a set of applications, running within your environment. And it is critical to communicate in real time. For instance, the government who may have to respond quickly to a disaster or a company experiencing a crisis needs to get all the employees together, even though they reside in different parts of the world.

It all began in the early '90s when certain network equipment manufacturers were declaring that all companies should think about leaving their old "legacy" Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and move towards IP Telephony. The main reasons cited were

• Only one set of cables would have to run to all the cubicles since both voice and data run on the same copper wires, and
• Reduction of staff personnel since the network and telephony communications teams would simply become one.

However each manufacture came up with their own flavor of rule sets for bringing up calls over the data network (proprietary rule sets known as protocols) to make phones ring. Since the protocols were proprietary in nature between the phone devices and the IP telephony PBXs, it was very difficult to work with different manufactures of IP telephony equipment. In other words, the manufactures were producing a great idea as long as you stayed with them and did not try to mix with other vendors.

Despite this obvious drawback, IP telecommunications kept emerging and so did the overall vision of simply saving money on copper wire pulls and employee hiring. The new buzz words today are unified messaging or communications, and the vision is that everyone will simply have one number which others would dial to reach you despite having multiple types of devices with many possible number combinations. All your faxes, emails, and voicemails will be present in one single convenient inbox.

Here are vision statements of the two leading manufactures today who are investing heavily in this area.

"Microsoft unified communications technologies use the power of software to deliver complete communications - messaging, voice, and video - across the applications and devices that people use every day.

"Integrating the experiences you associate with the telephone-phone calls, voice mail, and conferencing- the work you do on a computer-documents, spreadsheets, instant messaging (IM), e-mail, and calendars-has the power to fundamentally change the way people work.

"We believe unified communications will transform business in the coming decade in the same way e-mail changed the business landscape in the 1990s.

"When phone services become software, are managed by a server, and are delivered to desktop applications, many interesting things happen." (1)

Cisco Unified Communications: Enriching Collaboration through a Unified Workspace Today's organizations must contend with increasingly complex communications environments featuring a wide array of communications methods.

"Employees, business partners, customers, and constituents communicate with one another through infinite combinations of wired, wireless, and mobile phones; voice messaging; e-mail; fax; mobile clients; and rich-media conferencing.

"Too often, however, these tools are not used as effectively as they could be. The result is information overload, lack of agility, and misdirected communications that delay decisions, slow down processes, drive customers away, and reduce productivity. Ineffective communications also result in missed revenue opportunities because businesses are not prepared to quickly react to market changes.

"Unified communications solutions have proven their ability to help organizations solve such problems, enabling them to transform their business, streamline business processes and reduce costs. For years, companies of all sizes have been realizing the benefits that carrying voice, data, video, and mobile communications across a converged IP network can bring. Today, Cisco Unified Communications Solutions unify voice, video, data, and mobile applications on fixed and mobile networks, delivering media-rich collaboration experience across business, government agency, and institutional workspaces.

"These applications use the network as the platform to enhance comparative advantage by accelerating decision time and reducing transaction time." (2)

It is clear that the focus is using daily communications to accomplish all work in the most efficient way and without having the equipment that we use today get in our way. In Microsoft's overall vision, the computer and phone are now represented as a single instrument with which we execute our daily tasks.

Now the goal is to combine all communications into a single device we use daily and which stores communications, whether fax, email, or voice/video mail. However, we still have the proprietary boundaries that all manufactures of this technology are facing. Most companies today do not have a single solution from just one vendor to supply their telecommunications needs. A single rule set must be in place for all to work together, and in comes Session Initialization Protocol, or more simply, SIP.

This protocol actually was derived from two other IETF protocols as described below.

"SIP was originally developed by the IETF Multi-Party Multimedia Session Control Working Group, known as MMUSIC. Version 1.0 was submitted as an Internet-Draft in 1997. Significant changes were made to the protocol and resulted in a second version, version 2.0, which was submitted as an Internet-Draft in 1998. The protocol achieved Proposed Standard status in March 1999 and was published as RFC 2543 [3] in April 1999. In September 1999, the SIP working group was established by the IETF to meet the growing interest in the protocol. An Internet-Draft containing bug fixes and clarifications to SIP was submitted in July 2000, referred to as RFC 2543 'bis.' This document will be first published as an Internet-Draft then as an RFC with a new RFC number, which will obsolete RFC 2543. To advance from Proposed Standard to Draft Standard, a protocol must have multiple independent interworking implementations and limited operational experience. To this end, forums of interoperability tests, called 'bakeoffs,' have been organized by the SIP working group. Three interoperability 'bakeoffs' took place for SIP in 1999, with more planned for 2000. The final level, Standard, is achieved after operational success has been demonstrated [4]. With the documented interoperability of the bakeoffs, SIP should move to Draft Standard status sometime in early 2001.

"SIP incorporates elements of two widely used Internet protocols: HTTP (Hyper Text Transport Protocol) used for web browsing and SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol) used for e-mail. From HTTP, SIP borrowed a client-server design and the use of uniform resource locators (URLs). From SMTP, SIP borrowed a text-encoding scheme and header style. For example, SIP reuses SMTP headers such as To, From, Date, and Subject. In keeping with its philosophy of 'one problem, one protocol,' the IETF designed SIP to be a pure signaling protocol. SIP uses other IETF protocols for transport, media transport, and media description." 3

SIP has taken off leaps and bounds, but why? The easiest answer is the fact that it leverages the internet structure to request and deliver calls and conferences. Because of this, it has quickly emerged as the leading IP telecommunications protocol today, not only for its robust nature in dealing with complex telephony signaling, but also using structures used daily on the Internet to set up calls like one's email address.

An extension called SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) has been added to this protocol. SIMPLE was introduced in the IETF standards body through RFC 3261, which allows instant messaging between callers, as well as allowing each caller to view "presence" information of the other caller. This allows the caller to see if the party called is available to take the call, or they went to lunch for 45 minutes, even before picking up the phone to call them. This saves many wasted minutes spent trying to reach a party that is not available, or would indicate the need to contact them through another method. Just think how much time is wasted in a company by employees picking up the phone and dialing another employee only to get a fast busy tone or voice mail.

Who are the major players in the Unified Messaging arena for the enterprise? The answer is Cisco, Microsoft, and IBM. However, Cisco and IBM have been working very closely together to blend their strengths to deliver a strong Unified Messaging package. Microsoft is new to this area, but they have had lots of help through their direct association with Nortel. For the small to medium business range, there are literally hundreds of start-ups competing for this area. including Cisco with the Linksys division. For instance, if you are a small company and understand IP Telephony, you could get an IP PBX for no money running on Windows or Linux platform to service up to eight simultaneous calls with limited feature support. (4) Features, in this case, would refer to things like Call Parks, Hunt Groups, and Console Operator support. It is amazing how competition is driving down the price for the small business market. We could see many more companies compete not only for the small-to-medium business range but also into the enterprise market since IP communications is an application running within your company.

Whoever can build or program the best application for Unified Communications will win the market, and the top three companies competing heavily understand that. This competition is great because it leads to better services for the enterprise or small business owner, as well as lower costs. Just think, not too long ago, it used to cost around a quarter of a million dollars for an enterprise switch with features and a couple of hundred phones to go with it, but today the initial investment is substantially less. This means the return on investment (ROI) will appear a lot faster than before and is more quantifiable.

Now let's look at a 60,000-foot view of the main player solutions starting with Microsoft.

Microsoft

Microsoft has made a significant contribution to the Unified Messaging effort for the enterprise market. First, they positioned an instant messaging product with presence capability through their initial LCS product line and now with Office Communications Server (OCS) they support rich, full-featured voice/video conferencing, integration with all legacy or IP PBX vendors for phone devices and feature support. Next, Unified Messaging was added in their Exchange 2007 product line which allows basic Auto Attendant and subscriber voice mail capability.

Microsoft is not in the phone business per se but teamed up with Nortel and developed LG-Nortel Tanjay

Phone-sets based on Microsoft's popular windows CE operating system (OS). Again, Microsoft's main thrust is that the phone and PC become one. Their main goal is to use a single instrument for all corporate communications; therefore, not too many desk phones will come out of OCS's direct compatible product line. Instead, you will couple OCS with your current phone system using Remote Call Control (RCC). This will give the Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC) client on the PC the ability to make a call via a phone on their desk through the current phone switch. Microsoft has clearly stated they are not in the PBX business and that does not seem to be their focus at the time of writing this document, but things can change.

The major advantage of the Microsoft solution is that their servers are embedded in the majority of enterprise IT server rooms. Microsoft also makes an outstanding OS platform for easy creation of advanced programming solutions that enterprises have been using for quite a few years. However, another company that has a major footprint is Cisco.

Cisco

Cisco has been considered the pioneers of IP telephony. When they first introduced IP PBXs, the majority of TDM manufacturers scoffed at them, saying that it would never take off. Well, today it has, and Cisco is not only in the middle of IP telephony, but also has unified messaging in a battle for the enterprise market place. Cisco, like Microsoft, has a clear advantage because a majority of IT shops have Cisco as their primary router and switch supplier. With a little additional cost, these same customers can install and get IP telephony and unified messaging support as well.

Cisco first introduced their true unified messaging product, Unity, which was acquired from a company called Active Voice, and which used other message stores like Microsoft Exchange or IBM Domino as a catch for all voice mail and fax mail. Cisco, seeing the advantage that SIP protocol had in providing better IP telephony services, started supporting this protocol in the Call Manager 4.0 product line with limited support. Now, Cisco has Communications Manager 7.0, which allows not only Cisco IP Phones but 3rd party manufacture SIP phones to be used directly with their IP phone PBX product.

To leverage the full capabilities of SIMPLE, Cisco decided to develop their own instant messaging client called Cisco IP Phone Messenger, or CUPS client (IM client-like) for short. It gets its configuration and communications support by using a gateway server called the Cisco Unified Presence Server (CUPS). We will explore this solution further

With this client, Cisco has incorporated the ability to view then number of voice mail/fax mail messages, provide advance presence information to other CUPS clients, and provide seamless RCC (sometimes referred to as "click to call") control of Cisco IP PBX-controlled IP Phones, allowing the IM Clients to call via their contacts lists. Cisco was not the only company developing an IM client for the enterprise.

IBM

IBM developed an IM client to couple to their Domino Server (email server) called the IBM Sametime Solution. (5) This solution allowed users to send and receive, like the Cisco and Microsoft solutions, and provided secure IM communications linked via their contact list coupled to their Lotus Notes client. Their just-released new client now has an embedded soft phone, allowing the IM chat client to easily raise the call through their call control mechanism, most likely using the SIP protocol or use a 3rd party PBX solution using click to call feature. The click to call feature works with a large list of PBX manufactures, including Cisco's Unified Communications Manager via the Cisco Unified Presence Server (CUPS). What sets the IBM IM feature apart from the others is the ability to determine the exact location of those they are communicating with and then to quickly map their position using the add-on Google map plug-in.

Blended Solutions

The majority of enterprise users do not necessarily use a single solution. A blended approach may have to be exercised; however, specialized gateways may have to be produced to tie the above-mentioned solutions together. While they may be using the same standard SIP protocol to incorporate call control and presence information through their clients, they have also added non-compliant extensions to incorporate features that they see lacking in the standards-based protocol, thereby developing a more robust solution for their customers. All software or manufacturing organizations, except for one, have included these gateways to tie the different solutions together; for example, Cisco IP Phones "point to click" with IBM Sametime using the CUPS server as the gateway mechanism. This is paramount because not too many organizations just use one vendor for all of their solution requirements when it comes to unified communications.

Summary

In conclusion, unified communications is really communications "awareness" of those with whom we are trying to communicate, combined with speed and minimal interruption. Now clearly, all the major manufactures of VOIP systems are executing their respective solutions today. However, it is the best solution is the one that is the right fit for a particular company, one that streamlines their business practices and allows a seamless integration into their current operations. This is far beyond the concept of just making a call and leaving a simple voice mail.

Footnotes

1. http://www.microsoft.com/uc/vision.mspx

2. Cisco Unified Communications Solution Overview: "http://www.federalnewsradio.com/pdfs/Cisco%20UnifiedCommunicationsSolutionOverview.pdf">http://www.federalnewsradio.com/pdfs/Cisco%20UnifiedCommunicationsSolutionOverview. pdf

3. SIP: Understanding the Session Initializations Protocol by Alan B. Johnson ISBN: 9781580531689

4. http://www.3cx.com/phone-system/product-tour.html

5. IBM SWG CPO -WPLC Briefing 2008: http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/dw/techbriefings/presentations/lotus/summary.pdf